Time-lapse Traffic Camera Movies

by Gary Burd · August 25, 2008

I created the movies on this page from sequences of WSDOT traffic camera images.

Wilburton Tunnel Demolition

NE 4th Street Bridge Demolition

NE 8th Street Bridge Roll ( more info )

How To

Capture a sequence of images using a curl and a bash script:

#!/bin/sh

CAMERA_URL=http://images.wsdot.wa.gov/nwflow/cctv693.jpg
SLEEP_SECONDS=89

i=1
while true
do
   curl $CAMERA_URL > $i.jpg
   i=$(($i + 1))
   sleep $SLEEP_SECONDS
done

Convert the sequence of images to a movie using mencoder.

mencoder -ovc copy -mf w=320:h=261:fps=15:type=jpg \
   'mf://*.jpg' -o movie2.avi